The University of Arizona

Robin Stryker

Professor of Sociology and Affiliated Professor of Law
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin (1986)

Office: Soc Sci 428
Phone: (520) 621-3531
Email: rstryker
Vita: PDF

Research Interests

Robin Stryker focuses on law, politics, inequality and social change. She has two inter-related research programs, one in American regulatory law and politics, the other in cross national study of the welfare state and labor markets. She has written on sociological theory and methods, and on a variety of substantive topics, including organizations and institutional change, law's legitimacy, globalization and the welfare state; cross national family policy and gendered labor markets; law, science and public policy; the political economy and culture of labor, antitrust and employment regulation; affirmative action and pay equity; and US political culture and welfare reform. Supported by a National Science Foundation grant (2005-09) and a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2008-09), she is writing a book on the role of economic, sociological, psychological and statistical expertise in equal employment opportunity law and politics, 1965-present.

Representative Publications
  • 2009. R. Stryker & P. Wald. "Redefining Compassion to Reform Welfare: How Supporters of 1990s US Federal Welfare Reform Aimed for the Moral High Ground." Social Politics In Press. Special Issue on Culture, Politics and Discourse in the Emergence of New Gendered Welfare States, edited by A. Orloff and B. Palier.
  • 2008. S. Eliason, R. Stryker and E. Tranby. "The Welfare State, Family Policies and Women's Labor Market Participation: Complementary Fuzzy-Set and Compliers' Average Causal Effects Analyses." In Method and Substance in Macrocomparative Analysis, L. Kenworthy & A Hicks (eds), Palgrave-MacMillan.
  • 2007. R. Stryker. "Half Empty, Half Full or Neither? Law, Inequality and Social Change." Annual Review of Law & Social Science 3: 69-97.
  • 2005. L. Edelman and R. Stryker. "A Sociological Perspective on Law and the Economy." Pp. 527-551 in Handbook of Economic Sociology, 2nd Ed., N. Smelser and R. Swedberg, eds. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  • 2004. N. Pedriana and R. Stryker. "The Strength of a Weak Agency: Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Expansion of State Capacity, 1965-1971." American Journal of Sociology 110: 709-760.
  • 2000. R. Stryker. "Legitimacy Processes as Institutional Politics: Implications for Theory and Research in the Sociology of Organizations." Research in the Sociology of Organizations 17: 179-203.